Due to the vast and increasing amount of traffic generated by users on the Internet, businesses continue to seek more effective means to advertise their goods and services online. In recent years, the online advertising environment has evolved to enable the use of user profiles for providing targeted advertising. Such user profiles may provide insight into a user's habits, personality, shopping trends, in addition to various other details about an individual's life.
One major privacy concern and criticism of interest-based advertising is that data that is collected and used to build user profiles and interest segments may be easily accessed or perused by government entities or malicious parties. For example, there have been numerous recent public revelations regarding the easy access that is provided to aggregated user data by some of the largest social media platforms. Implementing targeted ad campaigns involves the audience intelligence providers gathering and processing information about users, which is known as “profiling.” One way intelligence providers gather user information is by tracking users as they surf the Internet by using Internet “cookies.” Generally, a cookie is a small piece of data placed on the user's browser when the user visits a website belonging to an ad network. The cookie usually contains, among other things, a unique identifier associated with the user. Depending on the practices of the ad network, the cookie may contain other information, such as date and time information, an estimated zip code of the user, and browser history information. The cookie is stored for a specified time and returned whenever the user subsequently visits that website or another website in the ad network. By compiling and analyzing cookie information associated with a particular user gathered across multiple websites, a “user profile” indicating various attributes, preferences, and/or interests of the user can be built. This profile may then be used by ad networks and/or ad exchanges to support targeted ad campaigns. Of course, other user tracking methods may be used by intelligence providers to gather information about users and to build user profiles.
Recent improvements in data correlation techniques have allowed third parties, such as data brokers and other audience intelligence providers, to link multiple user profiles together, and even to discover real-world user identity information. As a result, sensitive information about an individual may be discovered and misused. Many users are unaware that personal data is being collected from their device and sold to third parties. Some people find such user tracking and profiling methods employed by online advertisers to be intrusive or invasive, but find “opting-out” to be difficult.
Monetizing data regarding users is important for the ability to provide online content that is inexpensive from the user's standpoint. However, to maintain user loyalty and usage, privacy concerns have to be addressed. Embodiments of the current disclosure involve protecting user data from wholesale harvesting by government entities and would-be attackers, without reducing utility in the data and without significantly impacting performance in delivery of content to users.